


Six Reasons Why Keeping a Journal Is Good For Your Health

by GloriaMundi



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5+1 Things, Bucky Barnes's Notebooks, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 14:40:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6911329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>notebooks ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Six Reasons Why Keeping a Journal Is Good For Your Health

The notebook is water-stained and warped. There is a partial boot-print on the cover. It is concealed beneath a layer of plaster and lath, which was soaked by water from a rusted pipe and has now hardened into a kind of concrete. Still, the dark green cardboard cover catches Lenuta's eye. 

She pulls the notebook out of the rubble, tries to open it: the sweaty, dirty rubber glove's getting in the way, so she takes it off. She opens the notebook, flips through the pages: she doesn't bother to peel page from page where the water's glued them together, but she sees enough to know that the writing is in blue pen, in two different scripts: Cyrillic and Roman. She cannot read either.

The notebook is less than half full of writing. She rips out the pages that have been written on, lets them fall back into the ruin of the apartment. Her son Istvan is always asking for books to draw and write in (he likes to draw soldiers and superheroes) and they are so expensive in the shop! He'll like this, even if it is damp and dirty. 

She slips it into her bag. Her supervisor won't care.

* 

Most of the rubbish from the wrecked flats ends up in a landfill site outside the city. Rubbish? There are broken tiles, half-empty boxes of cereal, bath towels, piles of old newspaper, children's toys.

After dark the scavengers come out. It's a Friday, and the municipal workers are rushing to finish their shifts and get home to their families: other days, they linger when they've tipped out the garbage, turning it over to see if there's anything they can use. 

Fridays are best, for the people who live here. Marya and her friends spread out in a line, pacing slowly forward over the heaps of refuse, squinting down in search of hidden treasure. She sees a photograph -- Captain America, she thinks he's called -- and bends down to pick it up. It's glued into a small black book, full of scribbled writing. 

"Oooh!" says Ana, leaning in. "This'll burn well. Oh, sweetheart, don't cry. You can have the picture. There, darling. It's yours. You fold it up and keep it safe now, okay? Okay. But you don't want the rest of this nasty book, do you? Of course you don't. We can put it in the fire to keep us warm."

*

Bucky doesn't know what happened to his backpack. His memories. His head's still full of horrors but he no longer has anywhere to put them. He's lost the history of himself that he was constructing, and the thought of starting over is ... exhausting.  
There's one thin blue notebook that's still with him. He used to carry it in his back pocket when he left the tower block, in case the past flared up while he was out in the world.

There's a page about going to the market to get some food, and flashing back to when he bought oranges in Brooklyn long ago. (He wrote that the day before Steve came.) There's another page with a sketch of angles and elevations from a job he did -- from a _murder_ he _committed_ in a small French town in the Sixties. He still can't remember the name of the town.

Some pages are empty. He could write something. Write about Steve, about Iron Man, about Zemo. About the Falcon and the car journey and. And. And.

But what's the point? He has endured, he has survived: but the prospect of going back to the beginning defeats him.

* 

"These were in Barnes' backpack," says Carter, depositing a file box full of notebooks on Natasha's desk. "I was hoping you could review them."

"Sure," says Natasha. She and Sharon have both taken risks to help Steve and the Soldier. They're on the same page.

"Let me know if there's anything that should be shared," says Sharon, and Natasha hears the unspoken request: hide anything that should _not_ be shared: anything that's purely personal: anything that might let someone recreate the … experiment.

She extracts a grey notebook, riffles the pages with her thumb. Cyrillic script catches her eye, and she begins to read.

_He dropped his shield. Wouldn't fight. Called me his friend. He fell from the ..._ Natasha has to sound out the next word phonetically. Helicarrier.

_His name was Steve. I saw him before._

Barnes has secrets too, of course. She's holding his memories in her hand.

_He said I knew him. He knew me. He let himself fall instead of fighting me._ Which confirms something she's suspected for a while now. The Winter Soldier -- James Barnes -- is more important to Steve than _anything_.

"I'll let you know," she says. "If there's anything relevant."

*

Steve opens his post carefully these days: there's always the risk of something that might explode in his face. It wouldn't necessarily kill him, but it'd be inconvenient for the others.

Today's package is postmarked Bucharest. It contains nothing but an amber-coloured journal with black end-papers. A quick glance inside tells Steve that this was Bucky's: he'd know that handwriting anywhere. He upends the envelope, but there's no note.

Natasha, then. Letting him know … what? That she has Bucky's notebooks, or access to them? That she knows where Steve and the others are? Who knows, with Natasha.

The writing in the notebook is less careful than ... before. There are sketches, little maps: lists of names: whole pages scribbled out so violently that the pen's torn the page.

He closes the notebook and slides it back into the envelope. He doesn't want to read it. Natasha has probably read every word. Maybe there are others, and she will have read them too. But that's Natasha, and Steve is … not like that. It feels like the worst kind of intrusion, to read the words that Buck meant only for himself. 

Bucky can tell Steve whatever he wants, when he wakes up.

*

T'Challa has kept the red notebook that Zemo was carrying. He did not mention it to the doctors working on Barnes, nor to Steve Rogers. It is, he believes, an artifact of wickedness, a manual of torture and the weaponising of a good man.

Yet he cannot resist reading it. 

A great deal of it is irrelevant now. The Siberian silo has been emptied. The chair they used to wipe Barnes' mind has been reduced to its component parts: he'd made sure of that himself, after he'd tended to Stark. In the red notebook there are codes for doors that no longer exist, passwords for long-extinct systems, diagrams of wiring -- ah, for the arm. _Those_ might be useful: he copies them and encrypts the copies.

There are lists of words -- in Russian, which T'Challa does not read well. He does not need to read them: he is certain, from the context, that they are the words Zemo used to control the Soldier.

He wraps the notebook in fire-resistant cloth and seals it in his personal safe.

When Barnes awakes, he will present the red notebook. A token of emancipation. A symbol of agency. An offering to be burnt.

**Author's Note:**

> I seem to be stuck on the 5+1 structure for post-CACW fic. Lack of time or of confidence or of bigger ideas? At least I'm writing!


End file.
